


Inevitability

by Emeraldsnows



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Coping, Cuddling, Everyone Is Poly Because Avengers, Fluff, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-11
Updated: 2014-12-11
Packaged: 2018-03-01 00:56:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2753582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emeraldsnows/pseuds/Emeraldsnows
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They came together by accident. <br/>When Steve brought Bucky back to the Tower, he brought Sam along as well.<br/>Natasha brought Clint with her to the Tower, just like he'd brought her to SHIELD just a few years ago.<br/>Somehow, they end up in the midst of a giant puppy pile.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inevitability

**Author's Note:**

> This was just a short little thing I wrote one day, not really trying to do anything with it. I love the Cap fam+ Clint (as I call it) and I wanted to play with the idea of them falling in together. It wound up getting a bit Clint POV heavy, so watch out for that, but he's my favorite so it was honestly unavoidable.

They came together by accident. 

 

When Steve brought Bucky back to the Tower, he brought Sam along as well. Steve’d gotten close to the pararescue veteran, spending long nights in motel rooms across the country searching for Bucky. They stayed up late talking over leads, over things Steve had missed, over life as soldiers. And slowly, Steve found a person with shared life experience, like he’d joked with Natasha in that stolen truck so many weeks ago. 

They served, they lost friends, they came home to find things were just different. They woke up from nightmares and comforted each other in the dark. 

And then they found Bucky hiding out, trying to remember and make up for everything the Winter Soldier did. They dragged him back to New York, to Brooklyn. And that lasted half a day until Stark caught wind they were back in town and immediately sent a car to pick the three of them up. 

Stark gave them a floor with too many rooms and beds for two kids from Brooklyn and a man with a studio apartment. They settled in bedrooms close to each other until Bucky woke screaming too many nights in a row. They squeezed into Bucky’s queen size bed until an absolutely huge mattress and bedframe appeared in Steve’s old room. 

(And Bucky was impressed with Pepper’s decorating and moving crew. He never left their floor and he hadn’t even noticed.)

.:.

Natasha brought Clint with her to the Tower, like he’d brought her to SHIELD just a few years ago. They came as a set now, ever since Budapest, even if they remembered it very differently. 

Clint followed Natasha after the attack on New York. Because she of all people understood what it felt like to be the cause of so much death under the hands of another person. To have all of SHIELD hovering in case they turned again. Natasha fought from day one to prove she was loyal and Clint was her number one advocate. Now their roles were reversed and he needed her support. With SHIELD, with his blue hued demons running around in his head, with getting out of his bed in the morning. 

Natasha kicked his ass because wallowing was just pathetic. 

So when Stark invited them both to his overgrown playhouse, Natasha dragged him out of his closet sized SHIELD quarters. She didn’t listen to a single word of his protests.

They got their own floor and Clint spent all of his time moping on Stark’s shooting range. There was absolutely nothing short of an alien god fucking with his head again that would get him to admit how much he fucking loved that shooting range. The simulations were good enough to challenge him, to make him sweat and actually move around. He fired arrow after arrow until he ran out and had to collect them back up. Rinse, repeat until he exhausted himself, collapsed on his bed and hoped he was too tired for nightmares.

He never was.

And for the first few weeks, he had Natasha, his blessedly brutal better half. Then Rogers showed up with his pack of broken toy soldiers and he lost her. 

She ran to Barnes, because they had history they both wanted to figure out. Clint knew he shouldn’t feel jealous, that he had no claim on Nat; she didn’t deserve having to look after his broken ass. But he’d gotten so used to her constant presence, to being her only confidante, the only man she trusted. Now she talked to Barnes in soft Russian, she joked with Rogers like they were old pals, and Clint felt alone. 

He could deal with that; he’d done alone for too much of his life. After Barney left, after Trickshot let him go, for those bad years before SHIELD recruited him and Coulson became his handler. Alone was his punishment for trying to get too close and it kept everyone safe. 

With the number of SHIELD agents dead, he deserved to be alone for a fucking century. 

Weirdly enough, it was Barnes who brought him in. He just showed up while Clint was on the range, sweat soaking his shirt. And without even asking, the damn cyborg started shooting with him. He used a rifle to take Clint’s targets and drive him up a goddamn wall. Clint frowned as each bullet beat his arrows, hit exactly where he aimed. He growled and tried harder.

Barnes fucking snickered and Clint was completely within his rights to punch the prick in the jaw. 

Well, he tried.

Natasha was completely unsympathetic as she popped his shoulder back into the joint. She wouldn’t let him leave and he spent the night on the couch while she shared a bed with Barnes or Rogers or both. That lasted until 2 am when the infomercials lit up his tired, red eyes. Wilson stood in front of the TV, blocking a riveting spiel on special kitchen knives. Clint glared at him, Wilson called him absolutely pathetic, and somehow Clint found himself in the middle of a freaking puppy pile. 

They came together by inevitable accident but all their many broken pieces seemed to fit together.


End file.
